In his Neo-Ruins series Motoda depicts a post-apocalyptic Tokyo, where familiar landscapes in the central districts of Ginza, Shibuya, and Asakusa are reduced to ruins and the streets eerily devoid of humans. The weeds that have sprouted from the fissures in the ground seem to be the only living organisms. “In Neo-Ruins I wanted to capture both a sense of the world’s past and of the world’s future,” he explains.

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13 thoughts on “Tokyo Revelation”

Stunning. As someone who lives in Cairo, I can only say that there are parts of the city that look similar anyway. As the five-storey brick tenements are thrown up, as they creep closer to the river-cliffs either side of the Nile floodplain, they often sit there for years before tenants move in. As they do so, they slowly decompose, whilst serving as rubbish tips for whoever happens to live close by. One drive around the Cairo orbital road is a strange drive through what Iggy Pop called “the city’s ripped backsides”.

The images themselves are great technical achievements, but for those of us who grew up on A Canticle for Liebowitz, William Gibson, Mad Max and, most importantly, Fallout, the work isn’t exactly groundbreaking (pun intended).